[Samba] Migration to Samba using external LDAP server

[Pseudomizer]

Hello,

 

we are in the process of implementing a samba server running 3.0.14 and an
external LDAP server running Microsoft ADAM. We have it also running with
Open LDAP for UNIX under Redhat. It works fine for every user account that
accesses the samba instance. The user mapping is done and all works fine.

 

Now we have the major problem of the migration and I would need some
guidance here please.

 

The external LDAP server does the mapping from the UID/GID to the SID from
MS every time a new user accesses the samba instance. But now we want to
consolidate multiple servers (from the same domain) to this samba instance.
We have about ~2.000 users in our domain and we can not let all of them
contact the samba server to create a user mapping.

 

The current situation is that we have to copy about 1.2TB of data to this
samba server maintaining the user permissions. We are used to tools like
Robocopy or Xcopy to migrate data to windows servers but in this case we are
not sure what will happen with the permissions of the files if we use such
tools with our samba server. 

 

So my questions would be:

 

-          Are there any procedure/best practices how to migrate to samba
using external LDAP server?

-          How can we create the appropriate mapping on the external LDAP
server to maintain the permissions?

 

Any help would be appreciated and please do not reply with emails like
"don't use samba, use NetApp" what happened in the past. We are not
interested in any other expensive NAS solution.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Best regards,

 

Pseudomizer